Azra Abbas was born in 1948 in Karachi. She earned her master’s degree in Urdu from Kara­chi University and went on to teach Urdu literature at a government college in Karachi. Eventually, she and her husband, the poet and novelist Anwar Sen Rai (who works for the BBC), moved to England, where she currently resides. In 1981, her first work was published, comprising a long feminist prose poem in the stream-of-consciousness form. She has produced three collections of poems and one of short stories, along with an autobiographical narrative. She has also com­pleted a novel.